If we’re going to rage against cultural atrocities, let’s make sure we target the right ones

The highlight of my Christmas holidays was taking the family to see Avatar. It’s not often a film comes along which wife, Boy (11), Girl (9) and I are able to adore in equal measure. But James Cameron’s $200 million epic ego-fest hit the spot perfectly and for those families out there still wavering, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Whenever I’ve mentioned this to my right-leaning friends, though, the general reaction has been one of appalled horror. ‘But how could you?’ they want to know. Well, I tell them, for a start I think the blue cat-girl love-interest creature is seriously hot; the realisation of the jungle planet and its extraordinary flora and fauna is simply beyond amazing; and I really, really loved that chunk of the storyline where — not unlike Neo in The Matrix — the wheelchair-bound hero is gradually initiated into the ways of the blue-cat-jungle-people and becomes a kind of superhero.